O conceito e o uso de analogias como recurso didático por licenciandos de biologia

Abstract

Analogies are comparisons that teachers do among different domains. They are used in education to communicate abstract and new concepts, once analogies allow to transfer the knowledge from an area to another. Usually, comparisons are done between a non-familiar and a familiar, an observable and a non-observable, an abstract and concrete, an unknown and a known domain. Several Biology teachers use analogies to become their classes more interesting and understandable. However, the use of analogies requires some care by the teachers to avoid that different and non-desirable concepts from the analogous ones pass to what it is wanted to teach. Meanwhile, it is a very important didactic strategy, that should be taught to the licensees in their academic formation. To collaborate with the quality of Biology teaching, this research wanted to know what are the concepts that Biology licensees have about analogies, how their use them in their classrooms and if they had access to the analogy methodology in their course's disciplines. In addition to the survey about the concepts and their use, another goal of the research was to verify if these concepts could be changed and if their analogies could be better structured and built after a pedagogical intervention. Data were colleted through a written questionnaire applied to the licensee's class at the fourth grade of Biological Sciences from a public University in the North of Paraná state. The licensees answered eight questions about some analogies twice: first, before the pedagogical intervention and the second one, after. They also had their classes observed before and after the pedagogical intervention, for the analogies applied to be analyzed. The results show that the majority of the academic students could not define and exemplify an analogy correctly; did not know how to differentiate an exemplifying analogy from a metaphor; did not know any teaching method with analogy. The researched academic students claimed that they did not learn anything related to analogies in their teaching disciplines, even in Didactics. After the pedagogical intervention, realized as a mini-course, the licensees showed conceptual and procedural changes: gave concepts and examples of analogies correctly; knew how to differentiate analogy from other terms; recognized analogies as important didactic tools and used them previously prepared in their following classes. As well as other educational researches, this one intends to collaborate with the recognition of the use of analogies as an effective and stimulating didactic methodology, collaborating - in this way - for a teaching of Science in a creative and more interesting way.